A Fish in the Water by Mario Vargas Llosa — Read

Ever since the rally in the Plaza San Martín, my life had ceased to be private. Never again, until I left Peru after the second round of voting for the presidency, in June 1990, did I enjoy that privacy that I had always guarded so jealously (to the point of remarking that what attracted me about England was the fact that since nobody there ever picked a quarrel with anybody else, people turned into ghosts). Ever since that rally, at any hour of the day or night, there were people at my house, holding meetings, conducting interviews, organizing something or other, or else standing in line to talk with me, with Patricia, or with Álvaro. Reception rooms, hallways, stairways were always occupied by men and women whom I'd often never met and whose reason for being there was utterly unknown to me, reminding me of a line from a poem by Carlos Germán Belli: "This is not your house, you're a man of the wilds."

Since María del Carmen, my secretary, soon found herself swamped with work, others came to give her a hand, first Silvana, then Rosi and Lucía and later on two volunteers, Anita and Elena, and a room next to my study had to be built to lodge that woman's army and make room for paraphernalia that I (who have always written by hand) saw, as if in a dream, being brought into the house, being installed and beginning to work all around me: computers, faxes, photocopy machines, intercoms, typewriters, new telephone lines, rows of filing cabinets. That office, next to the library and a few steps away from our bedroom, operated from early in the morning till late at night, and till dawn in the weeks immediately preceding the election, so that I came to feel that everything about my life, including sleeping and even more intimate matters, had become public.